The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Lycium
Also called Teaplant, Matrimony Vine, Teaplants, Boxthorn, Honeythorns, Box Thorns, Boxthorns
Lycium is a genus of thorny, drought-tolerant shrubs in the nightshade family, growing 1 to 4 m tall, mostly from arid and semi-arid regions. Common members include goji and wolfberry types grown for their berries, and the key to growing them is sun, sharp drainage, and little water.
Lycium is a genus of flowering plants in the nightshade family, Solanaceae. The genus has a disjunct distribution around the globe, with species occurring on most continents in temperate and subtropical regions. South America has the most species, followed by North America and southern Africa. There are several scattered across Europe and Asia, and one is native to Australia. Common English names for plants of this genus include box-thorn, wolfberry, and desert-thorn. Plants of the World Online currently accepts 101 species. Other estimates are of 70 to 80 species.
Lycium species mostly occur in arid and semi-arid climates, and a few are known from coastal zones in somewhat saline habitat types.
Lycium has been known to European herbalists since ancient times, and species were traded from the Far East to Europe by the Romans, for example via Ariaca and the port of Barbarikon near today's Karachi, as mentioned in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. In his Naturalis historia, Pliny the Elder describes boxthorn as a medicinal plant, as does Pedanius Dioscorides in his P. Dioscoridae pharmacorum simplicium reique medicae.
Matrimony vine · Baja desert-thorn · Chinese desert-thorn · European Matrimony Vine · Lycium humile · Pale desert-thorn
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Lycium by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
